Emergency phone lines down across Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties Tuesday; Alternate options detailed below

SANTA BARBARA COUNTY AND SAN LUIS OBISPO COUNTY, Calif. – There is a county-wide phone outage impacting 911 and emergency ten-digit lines in both Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties Tuesday.

Details on how to reach emergency services in both counties are shared below.

Santa Barbara County

Anyone with an emergency in Santa Barbara County is asked to call 805-896-5181 or 805-451-5639, text 911, or email info@sbsheriff.org shared the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office.

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office asks that the public not call to test those numbers to leave them open for emergencies and even if your call is dropped, dispatchers and deputies will try to call you back at the number you called from.

If you have an emergency is Santa Maria, you are advised to call 805-928-3781 ext. 2277 and the Santa Barbara Police Department has encouraged those in need of help to call 805-882-8900 or approach any public safety personnel currently on an internal tactical alert for maximum responsiveness while emergency lines are down.

"What we want the public to know is that the telephone lines in Santa Barbara County are impacted," said Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Public Information Officer Raquel Zick.

Zick said they are cellular customers, too.

They pivoted around 10 a.m. and shared the numbers of cell phones that look like old flip phones.

"We do have two non-emergency lines that are available, they are just temporary cell phones that we activated for use in this incident., " said Zick,"We do also encourage people to text to 911, it is very useful, it is probably the quickest way to get a hold of us right now."

Thanks to a grant that paid for RapidSOS's safety platform, (https://rapidsos.com,) dispatchers tracked the numbers of people trying to reach them this morning.

"That was a useful tool," said Zick, "It is an additional platform that captures information when you call 911, whether or not that call was completed, it captures your attempt to call and it does capture a call back number. Our dispatchers were very diligent, they quickly went to RapidSOS and started looking at those calls for service, looking at those incompleted calls and they did complete around 50 call backs from the RapidSOS system, which resulted in about 15 calls for service, including some medical emergencies that were in progress."

Zick said dispatchers are looking out for the public.

"I just want to reinforce that you know text to 911 it is a fantastic tool, not only for this emergency but if there is every anything where you can't talk on the phone, but you can text because you don't want anyone to hear you or your cell service isn't very good with call, that happens a lot, where you can't necessarily complete a call, but you can sent a text, that is another way to get a hold of us," said ZIck.

But don't text emojis, she said they are not an effective way to communicate.

According to the City of Santa Barbara, there is no estimated time for restoration of emergency lines.

But crews that contract with Frontier are working along De La Vina and Vernon in Santa Barbara where it appears a line was severed.

The area is full of crews doing bridgework.

As the sun was setting, authorized contractors were still at work trying to repair the problem.

For more information about the outage from the County of Santa Barbara, visit here.

San Luis Obispo County

According to the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office, the outage is impacting 911 for both landlines and cellular devices.

If you need help in San Luis Obispo County, call the Sheriff's Office's non-emergency dispatch line at 805-781-4550, option 3.

The outage is believed to be part of a larger regional issue, also impacting Santa Barbara County," shared the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office in a press release about the outage Tuesday. "We are closely monitoring the situation and actively working with local and state partners, as well as the affected service providers, to identify the source of the disruption and determine an estimated time of restoration."

This is an evolving situation and more information will be added to this article when it is available.